Romania wasn’t the first country we came to after we left Istanbul, it was the second.

The first, Bulgaria, is still too dark to write about. But. We were lucky to get out. And we wouldn’t have gotten in, or out, if the Canadian, Robert, hadn’t thrown his hookah and opiated hashish stash out of the van just meters from the border crossing. A matter of debate, “Get rid of it,” won the day, and Robert, through his thick, brown beard, said, “Stop the van.” Near some scrub pine trees alongside the concrete road, we scrubbed the VW Van of contraband and his Arab water pipe, and then proceeded with the optimistic, carefree, self-assured mindset of the historically short-lived, and, sadly, increasingly irrelevant, Western hippie class that we were.

There were eight of us in one brand new shiny van. We didn’t know each other. We’d met on a beach on a declining, depopulating Aegean island, fittingly named Antiparos, whose claim to fame was the existence of a Valley of Butterflies where millions came to roast, and of its proximity to a sister island, Paros, where Lord Byron had carved his name into the wall of a cave. The van was owned by Billy who bought it with his money from the Navy. He was just out of the Navy, a medic, and with his partner from the ship, James, they’d bought the van and had it parked in Athens. We all met there after the island and traveled up the east coast of Greece where I sold my blood in Thessaloniki and where we spent a few days in Istanbul. I looked across the Dardanelles to Asia. The bridge looked too long to walk. The Navy paid them well and they had been stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin and they patched up soldiers flown to them on their ship, and now they were done with it, and discharged, and never looked back and neither wanted to go home. They hated it and the war and all of it and their loathing of what they had done, what they had been forced to be a part of, the loathing stopped just short of themselves. They said there was nothing for them at home. Somehow, even through the Cold War rage, they had gotten visas to Russia, and as they meandered their way up through the Balkans, we tagged along for part of it, each for his own reason, each with their own destination, or concerted lack of one.

There was one girl with us, Hellena, a Swiss girl, a nursing student, she liked all of us and had a power of intervention that helped settle things. Thinking back, she must have had an oddly strong character to be traveling as she was with perfect strangers across new vistas, not yet twenty, unmoored yet moored. While we all thought of it and history has magnified it and altered it, people still required the necessary connections to interact intimately, and we carried within ourselves the natural inhibitions we all might have been born with, even if it was called the time of free sex. Maybe that’s why we drank.

Our military-green VW van cleaned as best we could get it, we came upon the Turkish-Bulgarian border. The sky was cloudy and the air cool for that time of year, late summer, but the landscape was dry to the point of crispness. We were flagged to stop. The soldiers directed us to a turn-off and we were told to wait. We must have been something unusual for them, something very threatening to their known political universe, because their anger was more than palpable, spilled over in their gruffness and visible disdain. If they were devotees of a social righteousness, then we were hedonists; if they were communists, then we were the children of capitalists; if we were black, then they were white. They did not want us. If they could, there would be punishment. This was the frontier.

Their brown, ill-fitting uniforms looked hastily made by a seamstress who could care less, and the overall impression of these custodians of Bulgaria did not inspire confidence in our joy of travel. Other soldiers came out of the shoddy concrete block blockhouse and came to stare at us as the officers in charge began to take the van apart. The officers did not speak English but they knew German, as Germany more than once has sought conquests in this area on their way to Odessa oil and warm water ports. The guards took everything apart, the seats out, the rugs up. The less they found, the more eager they became, until in the point their frustration -- grown to a bitterness in their mouths -- they telephoned for a dog. They took more apart and searched each article of clothing in our bags and our pockets and sneakers. The dog was coming from another border crossing and the feeling was that only one thing was saving us: the fact that the navy boys had visas to go on into Russia. Bulgaria was a vassal state of Moscow, the big mother, and if the Comintern powers in Moscow had granted visas, then maybe they would have to let us pass, as the visas had exact dates for entry into the Soviet Union, and whoa be these frontier administrators to countervail such a decision.

One of the odd things in our van was my bike, a Raleigh five speed. Long story. In our boredom, Hellena grabbed the bicycle and began riding around the border crossing. She crossed the parking lot and circled the van and started down the road as if she was entering the country all by herself, on and on, until she frighten everyone she might be shot in the back, but she turned, finally, and played with everyone’s fears. She had on tight white pants and seemed authoritative with her German and her obvious independence, being in the middle of seven men, yet having no observable attachment to any single male, her stature to the Bulgarians was growing into an almost insurmountable power. Their tone with us was slowly eroding. The longer they spent in our undogmatic, je ne sais quoi liberalism, the more they became interested in the little things about us.

The dog came. It went round and round. We feared a trace of hashish had fallen in the cracks, or a pot seed in the rug, but the dog found nothing, and I think by now the guards, too, were relieved, and Hellena let them ride my bike as I dug in my knapsack for a small pouch I carried with me.

In my pouch I had silver coins and I took out a couple and walked over to the guards and handed them each a silver half dollar and as I did so, and as they looked at the head on the coin, I pointed and said, “Kennedy, Kennedy!” When they saw the head of JFK on the coin and understood my intention, they looked up at me with a beaming lightness to their countenances and they were like broken from a trap of frozen consciousness and we were at that point allowed unrestrained entry into their country. Kennedy had been the only man in the world who could make a Russian like Khrushchev stand down. Kennedy was to the political world like the Beatles were to the music world and to the whole world and there has been no one since.

Next week, Behind the Iron Curtain, Romania